ave had trying to build a
modern television set from tapes like this?"

"I can imagine," Stanton said.

"You can see, then, why we're depending on you," Mannheim said.

Stanton merely nodded. The knowledge that he was actually a focal point
in human history, that the whole future of the human race depended to a
tremendous extent on him, was a realization that weighed heavily and, at
the same time, was immensely bracing.

"And now," the colonel said, "I'll turn you over to Dr. Yoritomo. He'll
be able to give you a great deal more information than I can."

_[8]_

The girl moved with the peculiar gliding walk so characteristic of a
person walking under low-gravity conditions, and the ease and grace with
which she did it showed that she was no stranger to low-gee. To the
three men from Earth who followed her a few paces behind, the gee-pull
seemed so low as to be almost nonexistent, although it was actually a
shade over one quarter of that of Earth, the highest gravitational pull
of any planetoid in the Belt. Their faint feeling of nausea was due
simply to their lack of experience with _really_ low gravity--the
largest planetoid in the Belt had a surface gravity that was only one
eighth of the pull they were now experiencing, and only one
thirty-second of the Earth gravity they were used to.

The planetoid they were on--or rather, _in_--was known throughout the
Belt simply as Threadneedle Street, and was nowhere near as large as
Ceres. What accounted for the relatively high gravity pull of this tiny
body was its spin. Moving in its orbit, out beyond the orbit of Mars, it
turned fairly rapidly on its axis--rapidly enough to overcome the feeble
gravitational field of its mass. It was a solid, roughly spherical mass
of nickel-iron, nearly two thirds of a mile in diameter and, like the
other inhabited planetoids of the Belt, honeycombed with corridors and
rooms cut out of the living metal itself. But the corridors and rooms
were oriented differently from those of the other planetoids;
Threadneedle Street made one complete rotation about its axis in
something less than a minute and a half, and the resulting centrifugal
force reversed the normal "up" and "down", so that the center of the
planetoid was overhead to anyone walking inside it. It was that fact
which added to the queasiness of the three men from Earth who were
following the girl down the corridor. They knew that only a few floors
beneath them yawned the